Our Moon May Have Formed From Multiple Small Ones, Says Report

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: A series of cosmic collisions may have spawned multiple moonlets that morphed into the one big moon we know today. Rather than one giant impact that knocked off part of early Earth and created the moon, a number of smaller collisions may have produced lots of mini-moons, Israeli scientists reported Monday. And those mini-moons, over millions of years, may have clumped together to make one large one. The researchers conducted nearly 1,000 computer simulations and estimate about 20 impacts could do the job. They say that would explain why the moon seems to be composed of material from Earth, rather than some other planet, too. It’s actually an old theory revitalized now by the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Raluca Rufu in Rehovot, Israel, and his team. Their findings were published in Nature Geoscience.